Garden

The parts of a whole life that don't fit on a resume, and why they belong here anyway.

I ran a horticultural research firm before I ever shipped software, and I never stopped being that person. The same design question runs through everything below and everything on the work pages: how do you tend a system so the whole thing stays healthy.

Permaculture and the homestead

My family and I homestead in East Tennessee. Permaculture is the discipline I trained in, and it's still the sharpest product framework I know. Observe before you intervene. Design for the edges. Let every element do more than one job. I apply those ethics to digital spaces every working day, and on weekends I apply them to actual soil.

Traditional woodworking

Hand tools, mostly. A plane and a chisel enforce a kind of honesty that software lets you defer: wood doesn't care about your roadmap, and a joint either fits or it doesn't. It's the best launch-gate discipline I've found.

Birding in East Tennessee

We're on a flyway here, and I keep a life list. Birding trained the skill I use most at work: noticing the small anomaly in a busy scene and staying with it until it resolves into a pattern.

Home lab and self-hosted infrastructure

I run my own stack at home: automation, AI agents, and the services my family relies on, self-hosted and documented. Partly for privacy, partly because operating your own infrastructure keeps your product instincts honest about what running systems actually costs.

Genealogy

I research my family's lines the way I research anything: primary sources, chain of evidence, and a healthy suspicion of unsourced claims. Identity resolution across a century of messy records turns out to be excellent training for an identity-and-fraud career.

Teaching

I also maintain a teaching practice in universal field physics, a contemplative framework for thinking about consciousness and interconnection. It's the same golden thread from a different angle: understanding the systems we're entangled with, and acting toward them with integrity. If you found me through that work, yes, same Ally. The FAQ says more.